Saturday, December 8, 2012

Bodhi Linux ARMHF RootFS

If you've been following my blog (or my updates on Google+) then odds are you know I currently have my hands on two ARM devices (plus a third in the mail) I am working on creating Bodhi Linux images for. With this in mind I've decided I am going to start maintaining a generic ARMHF root file system to make creating Bodhi Linux images for new ARM devices easier for myself and others.

You will always be able to find the latest copy of this file system on Bodhi source forge page here. The default user name is armhf and the default password is bodhilinux. The default user has sudo access by default.

Essentially on any device we have a functioning Linux kernel for - it should simply be as easy as extracting that file system to a bootable location. Copying over /lib/firmware and /lib/modules and then telling your ARM system to boot from this new file system.

As an aside - this is the first blog post I am writing from the Samsung ARM Chromebook with the Bodhi desktop! Hopefully have install instructions for this device online soon.

The Raspberry Pi has only a wired connection by default. The Bodhi image auto connects to wired networks at startup. If you have added a wireless adapter I would recommend using wicd-gtk as a GUI manager for wireless connections.

I am interested to try on Transformer TF-101I ran Ubuntu once, from OLife Prime installer, but it was an old release, boot only through recovery partition, and Ubuntu developers claim that supporting TF-101 is impossible.

Given that experience, I have a doubt that what they say is entirely true. It may be true that driver blobs are compiled for a specific release of xorg and cannot be freely ported. The release was obviously not perfect, but wifi, touchpad, xorg all worked (until I tried to upgrade to the latest release.)

I found a lot of sites that say you can put Bodhi Linux on TF101 but so far did not find the link. Can you tell me where to find it?

Jeff,My quick qestion ... I just received an A8 based 512meg Android tablet running ICS (DOPO m975). I would love to try bodhi on it, but without getting rid of android (still learning it, and not sure if IT want to replace it, yet.) Is there a way to do a live session?Revdjenk

hi there,i just got a tegra3 t30s x4/1gb lp-ddr2/10.1" @1280x800 tablet with ics 4.0.3 and after some stressing it it left me keyboardless and i discovered a nasty iptables/socket bug in the kernel, within a week from getting it, so i'm actually searching for alternatives.e17 is most certainly one of the sleekest linux desktops for me, so if you have any feedback for tegra soc i'm willing to test it and stress it a bit. android was a disappointment and over-hyped, i would rank ics a 4/10 and there are definitely some paranoid permissions in there, and it's greedy on the resources as well.. i'd love to hear some feedback, thanks.

Any word on rk3066 devices. I have a PiPO tablet I'd like to run Linux on. The guys working on the PicUntu project are dealing with this platform but to be honest i find bodhi to be a much more pleasurable user experience than any other Linux distro I've tried and would like to stick with it. Also, are you planning a dalvik layer for arm devices. This is the one thing that keeps me from switching entirely. I've been on android as my main computer so long and compatibility with android apps under a true Linux environment would be killer. Thanks and great work!

Dalvik doesn't work on true Linux distros as far as I'm aware. Porting something of that nature is outside the scope of what I do at the Bodhi project - someone else took up that torch it is for sure something we would package/provide for easy install though.

The MK808/rk3066 chipset REQUIRES Windows to flash Android images to the nand - and you need a custom android image to boot Linux on the device. So basically you HAVE to have Windows to boot Linux on the rk3066 hardware - that is something I refuse to support at Bodhi. It sends a very wrong message to hardware makers that it is OK to provide only Windows tools.

We have MK802 images and I plan to provide images for the GK802 (imx6 powered device) at some point as well since both of these devices are far more Linux friendly than anything rk3066 based.

This has changed. rkflashkit allows flashing from linux now. I use this to flash my rk3066 based tabled from Ubuntu. Realize your post is over a year old but thought this info might help anyone looking to flash rk3066 from linux only.

I would like to try it on my tf300t tablet there is already ubuntu port for it but i prefer to try Bodhi :) The Xubuntu port use an external sd card and can select Android or Xubuntu. forum.xda-developers.com

So, what exactly does one have to do to make a Bodhi image. I just got a pcDuino. It has an Allwinner A10 chip and a gigabyte of RAM, practically the same hardware as an MK802. I can build a bootable SD card and there are directions available to build a Debian system that can boot off it.

First off, let me say I'm extremely impressed so far with the latest release on my HP pavilion, and that's saying a lot coming from a die hard Ubuntu fan! question for you though, I see a lot of tablets mentioned for the ARMHF line, would this work on a Cell phone though? Just curious?

Umm... what would really be sweet is a port of Bodhi for the HP TouchPad! Oh yeah! :D

There are tons of TouchPads out there and in addition to WebOS, they can run Android and any ARM OS compiled for it's processor. In fact, I've seen several videos on youtube showing Ubuntu running on the TouchPad; however, for some serious productivity Bohdi would rock.

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My name is Jeff Hoogland and you've landed on one of my Google pages. I currently work as adjunct faculty teaching mathematics at ITT Technical Institute in Springfield IL. I am a free software advocate and part time code jockey. You can learn more about me from my personal website.

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